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Concept
Circumflex
Summary
The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from circumflexus "bent around"a translation of the περισπωμένη (perispōménē).
The circumflex in the Latin script is chevron-shaped (), while the Greek circumflex may be displayed either like a tilde () or like an inverted breve (). For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin alphabet, precomposed characters are available.
In English, the circumflex, like other diacritics, is sometimes retained on loanwords that used it in the original language (for example, crème brûlée).
In mathematics and statistics, the circumflex diacritic is sometimes used to denote a function and is called a hat operator.
A free-standing version of the circumflex symbol, , is encoded in ASCII and Unicode and has become known as caret and has acquired special uses, particularly in computing and mathematics. The original caret, , is used in proofreading to indicate insertion.
Ancient Greek accent
The circumflex has its origins in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it marked long vowels that were pronounced with high and then falling pitch. In a similar vein, the circumflex is today used to mark tone contour in the International Phonetic Alphabet. This is also how it is used in Bamanankan (as opposed to a háček, which signifies a rising tone on a syllable).
The shape of the circumflex was originally a combination of the acute and grave accents (^), as it marked a syllable contracted from two vowels: an acute-accented vowel and a non-accented vowel (all non-accented syllables in Ancient Greek were once marked with a grave accent). Later a variant similar to the tilde (~) was also used.
The term "circumflex" is also used to describe similar tonal accents that result from combining two vowels in related languages such as Sanskrit and Latin.
Official source
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